Log24

From Wikipedia —

"The Day of the Dead (Spanish: Día de Muertos ) is
a Mexican holiday celebrated throughout Mexico,
in particular the Central and South regions,
and by people of Mexican heritage elsewhere.
The multi-day holiday focuses on gatherings
of family and friends to pray for and remember
friends and family members who have died, and
help support their spiritual journey. . . .

The holiday is sometimes called Día de los Muertos 
in Anglophone countries, a back-translation of its
original name, Día de Muertos .

Gradually, it was associated with October 31,
November 1, and November 2 to coincide with the
Western Christianity triduum of Allhallowtide: 
All Saints' Eve, All Saints' Day, and All Souls' Day."

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The previous post concerned a poet who reportedly
died on October 23, 2018.  This journal on that date —

Last evening's New York Lottery numbers were 123 and 5597.

The 123 suggests page  123 of DeLillo's Underworld .

(For some context, see searches in this journal for Los Muertos  and for Pearly Gates of Cyberspace .)

The 5597 suggests the birth date of literary theorist Kenneth Burke— May 5, 1897.

These two topics—

• the afterlife (in the Latin-American rhythms context of yesterday's Shine On, Edmundo)
• and Kenneth Burke

are combined in Heaven's Gate, a post from April 11, 2003—

Babylon = Bab-ilu, “gate of God,” Hebrew: Babel or Bavel.”

The above observations on lottery hermeneutics, on a ridiculously bad translation, and on Latin rhythms did not seem worth recording until…

The New York Times Book Review  for Sunday, October 30, arrived this morning.

From page 22, an extract from the opening paragraph of a review titled…

Making Sense of It

David Bellos offers a new approach to translation.

BY ADAM THIRLWELL

The theory of translation is very rarely— how to put this?— comical. Its mode is elegy, and severe admonishment…. You can never, so runs the elegiac argument, precisely reproduce a line of poetry in another language…. And this elegiac argument has its elegiac myth: the Tower of Babel, where the world's multiplicity of languages is seen as mankind's punishment—  condemned to the howlers, the faux amis , the foreign menu apps. Whereas the ideal linguistic state would be the lost universal language of Eden.

See also Saturday's Edenville.

For more background, see the Log24.net entry of 3 AM Friday, the date of Meader’s death. See also a Boston Globe obituary that quotes John F. Kennedy: “Vaughn Meader was busy tonight, so I came myself.”

Note that Rousmaniere was John F. Kennedy’s roommate at Harvard.

Note, too, that Kennedy’s daughter Caroline attended Sister Salisbury’s school.

A memorial Mass for Sister Salisbury will be held on Monday, November 22, 2004, at the Church of St. Ignatius Loyola, 980 Park Avenue, at 5:30 pm.  

What does all this Camelot portend?   I do not know, but the following quote seems appropriate.

“Flores, flores para los muertos.”

— Tennessee Williams, 1947

Resurrection

The previous entry, on Christian theology, does not imply that all religion is bad.  Consider, for instance, the following from a memorial web page: 

“Al Grierson’s song Resurrection was sung by Ray Wylie Hubbard, on his outstanding Dangerous Spirits album. The song is awesome, and fits right into Ray Wylie’s spirit ‘and an angel lay on a mattress and spoke of history and death with perfume on her lingerie and whiskey on her breath . . . he’s loading up his saddlebags on the edge of wonder, one is filled with music and the other’s filled with thunder.’ Wow.”

Amen.
Grierson died on November 2, 2000
— All Souls Day, Dia de los Muertos.

My own favorite resurrection story is “Damnation Morning,” by Fritz Leiber; see Why Me? 

For more on the Day of the Dead, see Under the Volcano.

These are, of course, just stories, but may reflect some as yet unknown truth.

By the way, thanks, Joni, for leading me to KHYI.com on the day of the Toronto Stones concert.

Día de los Muertos

Today is All Souls’ Day, the Day of the Dead in Mexico. This site’s music for today, in honor of Rufino Tamayo, is “Luna y Sol.”